Exhibited will be sculptures, drawings, performances, and multimedia artworks which challenge the idea of embodiment and the body itself by dissecting, rearranging, distorting bodies or body parts and by redefining the body.

The show brings together art, philosophy, and cognitive science. It features 8 international artists, whose work explore the body, and a day-long workshop with presentations by scholars who study philosophy, psychology, and history of art.  In addition, there will be opportunities for visitors to participate in psychological studies that measure aesthetic experiences while viewing the art on display.

Artists
Fernanda Antola (Berlin, Brazil). Fernanda Antola’s artworks present the problem of modern life, focusing especially on media, and exploring the limits between body and technology.

Rachel Bernstein (New York). Rachel Bernstein seeks to redefine and challenge ideas about what is beautiful, what is grotesque, what is natural and what is unnatural. She combines images of human body part, animal innards, insects, and other living things into forms that are both unsettling and alluring.

Valentina Berthelon (Berlin, Chile, Mexico). In her artworks Valentina Berthelón has always been interested to work in the intersection between visual arts, music, science and technology. Influenced by the world of science, Valentina often takes concepts and aesthetic elements from this field to create audiovisual installations that evokes different forces of nature in relation to human body and perception.

Gina Eickers (Berlin). Gina Eickers explores the very possibility of bodies by reducing them to assemblies of forms, shapes, features they seem to consist of.  Her work explores the geometry of the body, but in a way that transgresses against the coolness normally associated with geometrical abstraction.

Julia Elsas (New York). Julia Elsas is a mixed-media artist who has always been interested in body language and in the awkward, charged tension that can be evoked by isolating the small gestures we make when we interact with each other. She explores aspects of this tension through embroidery, printmaking collage, sculpture, installation, and performance.

Muriel Gallardo (Berlin, Chile). The artworks of Muriel Gallardo represent an ongoing discovery of space from bodily experience. She highlights the instability and composite nature of space by the use of diverse materials and techniques.

Katarina Riesing (New York), Katarina Riesing is a mixed media artists whose work explores the body in various ways.  Her recent silk paintings are represent different parts of human anatomy as well as spaces and devices that contain and constrain bodies, such as instruments of punishment.

Veronika Witte (Berlin). Veronika Witte is interested in the role our bodies play in our present society, and the limits of the body, in the ending of its up to now given ‘fatality’ and in the desire to reinvent oneself over and over again.

PROGRAM:
01.08.2016 – 07.08.2016 Exhibition on display and interactive experiments
06.08.2016, 14:00 – 16:00 Lectures and discussions 16:00 – 18:00 Roundtable with exhibiting artists

Speakers
Elena Agudio (Artistic Director, AoN_a, a platform for Neuroscience and Art; Humboldt University, Berlin)
“The artifactual body – Neuroaesthetics and its limits” – Joerg Fingerhut (Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow; Humboldt University, School of Mind and Brain, Berlin)
“Embodiment, Emotion, Empathy, and Art” – Jesse Prinz (City University of New York; Einstein Foundation Fellow, Humboldt University, Berlin)

More information: www.artandembodiment.com

Kindly supported by Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Einstein Stiftung Berlin